We've seen the tea party's intransigence, we've seen how it was willing to destroy the country just to gain power, and we know that it wants to destroy this president.

We also know that a large chunk of the tea party wants to do so because the president is black. Plain and simple, there is a racist streak a mile long and wide in many of them.

They are supposed to be rooted in American history, but they espouse nonsense about how well the slaves were treated, how John Quincy Adams and the other founding fathers ended slavery, how Paul Revere "rang the bells" to warn the British.

The sad part is that the tea party gets away with these untruths because it has such an anti-intellectual bent. It makes up its own truths and doesn't care in that, in reality, retrenchment during a recession makes things worse.

The tea party is not a grass-roots movement but a well-orchestrated bunch of puppets controlled by Karl Rove, the Koch brothers, Dick Armey and other shady characters. It is enhancing their wealth at the expense of the rest of us.